{"id":89253,"date":"2020-10-14T18:00:05","date_gmt":"2020-10-14T15:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/robots-are-helping-to-advance-developmental-biology\/"},"modified":"2020-10-14T18:00:05","modified_gmt":"2020-10-14T15:00:05","slug":"robots-are-helping-to-advance-developmental-biology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/robots-are-helping-to-advance-developmental-biology\/","title":{"rendered":"#Robots are helping to advance developmental biology"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Robots are helping to advance developmental biology<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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\"Robots<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The study of developmental biology is getting a robotic helping hand.<\/p>\n

Scientists are using a custom robot to survey how mutations in regulatory regions of the genome affect animal development. These regions aren’t genes, but rather stretches of DNA called enhancers that determine how genes are turned on and off during development. The team describes the findings\u2014and the robot itself\u2014on October 14 in the journal Nature<\/i>.<\/p>\n

“The real star is this robot,” says David Stern, a group leader at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus. “It was extremely creative engineering.”<\/p>\n

The project was led by a former postdoc in Stern’s lab, Justin Crocker, now a group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany. In the past, to study the role of regulatory regions in development, scientists have examined the effects of just a few mutations at a time. But Crocker and Stern wanted to study hundreds of mutations\u2014to determine the role of every position in a regulatory region. These experiments required a complex preparation protocol to be repeated in exactly the same way across thousands of fruit fly embryos. Even slight inconsistencies in the preparation of samples could change the results.<\/p>\n